Nature Religion for
Real

Since my first involvement with Neopagan Witchcraft in
the mid-1970s, I have been told that ours is a "religion of
Nature." Occasionally people say, erroneously, that we "worship
Nature" or ask, as I was asked once during at talk at a Roman
Catholic seminary, whether we worship "nature" or "nature's
creator," a question that I did my best to slide around, since I
did not want to merely set up a counter-theology of "Yahweh in
drag."

In fact, contemporary Witches and other Pagans have tossed the
term "nature" around for years without seriously examining what it
means to them and without examining its history. For we should
realize that if we sat down to supper with Thomas Jefferson at
Monticello, for example, and over the soup course said that we
practiced "nature religion," his understanding of the term would
be considerably different--perhaps something quasi-Masonic--than
it conveys today.

Examining what we mean by "nature" is more than a scholarly
exercise for those of us who enjoy the history of ideas. For
Wiccan practitioners, for environmental activists, for hunters,
gardeners, and other outdoors people (and of course these are not
exclusive categories), the definition with nature involves our
definition of ourselves.

More importantly, I believe that we as practitioners must
clarify our definition of "nature" in order to create a religious
tradition that is a true "nature religion" or "earth religion." In
order to do so, we must examine first the several positions
towards which we tend to move when declaring ourselves to be
practicing "earth religion." As a point of clarification, let me
say that in this essay, I speak primarily for and to North
Americans; being someone with family and friends in both Canada
and the United States, that is my frame of reference. But I hope
that what I say will be applicable elsewhere. If there is anything
to universal principles, it should be.

On the surface, North American Neopagans seem to be stuck
between various variations on two approaches to the "earth
religion" question, both of which are untenable in the end. The
first approach would be merely to transport transatlantic
practices to North America. At its worst, that attitude leads
towards ethnic exclusivism: "You must be of Scandinavian ancestry
to worship Thor." (Or Yoruban to worship Xangó. Or
Lithuanian to worship Perkunas). At best, it's merely a poor
fit.

The other untenable position to appropriate other people's
traditions, to be, as one writer once put it, a member of the
"Wannabe Tribe." The tribal people of North America, of course, do
not speak with one voice on this matter; they never did. For every
Indian who guards the Mysteries, there is another one willing to
share them (and another one who has converted to Mormonism
anyway). But let us accept the statement of those Indians who say
angrily, "You stole everything else and now you want our
spirituality too!" I have smoked the sacred pipe when I have been
invited to, but I do not proclaim myself to be a Pipe Carrier.
Instead, let us look for a different starting point.

Writing in a recent issue of the West Coast Craft magazine
Reclaiming, writer Sam Webster offered his own take on
these questions. "What we do now draws on a variety of cultures
and does not match any culture in the past," he wrote. "Thus we
cannot claim to be the inheritors of any single culturally bound
religious tradition. We are not Greek, Roman, Celt or
whatever."

More significantly, Webster identified modern Neopagans (a term
he does not particularly like) as inheritors of the Enlightenment,
people brought up within the modern, scientific worldview, and
heirs not of land-based religious traditions but of intellectual
rebellion: of the occult revival that followed the French
Revolution, of the Romantics, of the Theosophists who looked to
the East, and of those more modern magicians such as Dion Fortune
who insisted that the West had its own magico-religious traditions
that were the equal of the East's. Given that mixed heritage,
Webster somewhat disingenuously still suggests that he and other
practitioners are not "neo" but are simply Pagan: "We have become
what our detractors feared us to become."1

Webster and others like him speak more in terms of spiritual
lineage than of relationships to the land and "earth religion,"
but as Neopagan writers never get tired of explaining, "Pagan" as
a derogatory term appears to derive from Roman army slang for
"peasant," hence "civilian," a usage adopted by the Army of
Christ. His argument, however, follows a familiar pattern: Does a
new religion attempt to assimilate with stronger forms around it?
Does it "withdraw" and search for its own "authentic" identity?
Or, to borrow some old Marxist revolutionary language, does it "go
to the people" in order to learn from them, to inspire them, and
to identify with their struggle?

The history of Twentieth Century Pagan revivals demonstrates
many varieties of the first two approaches. The first strategy has
been attractive because Pagans, like other varieties of homo
religiosus, tend to value the old. Witches in particular have been
referring to themselves as "the Old Religion" since at least the
1950s; our British co-religionists got a lot of mileage out of
their World War II self-identification with embattled Britain--in
other words, ancient ethnic Paganism--battling the "invader from
the East," a dazzling rhetorical conflation of the German
Wehrmacht with Christianity!3

Seeking a revitalized spiritual path, North American Pagans
likewise made an end run around the culture that most of us were
raised in and sought Old World, Old Time models. It would take
pages and pages to list all of the books and articles written,
with greater or lesser degrees of historical care, on what is
presented as "Old Religion." One might read Ancient Ways:
Reclaiming the Pagan Tradition, or The Arthurian Quest:
Living the Legends of Camelot, or Celtic Myth & Magick:
Harness the Power of the Gods & Goddesses, or Glamoury:
Magic of the Celtic Green World, or Scottish Witchcraft:
The History and Magick of the Picts, or Northern Magic:
Mysteries of the Norse, Germans & English, or Ways of
the Strega: Italian Witchcraft: Its Legends, Lore &
Spells. And those titles are only from one publisher's
catalog.

All of these titles demonstrate one thing: authors, publishers,
and Pagan book-buyers all perceive that the real power, magic,
knowledge, and "juice" is Over There rather than here in North
America. They give up their own power or any chance of having
their own "earth religion" in favor of the imported article--for
perhaps more accurately, in favor of a domestic product that is
presented as an imported article. (Truth-in-labelling laws are
nonexistent when it comes to "Celtic magic.")

If, however, the North American Pagan searches elsewhere for
authenticity, his or her gaze is likely to fall upon the "noble
savage," the idealized creature dubbed the "Eco-Indian" by the
iconoclastic ecofeminist Mary Zeiss Stange, who writes in her book
Woman the Hunter, "The problem with such idealized
representations as ecological gurus, of course, is that they in no
way realistically portray original Native American life. The
Eco-Indian has been a vehicle for that ambivalence towards
wilderness which is as old as the Euro-American cultural
imagination." In the "Eco-Indian" we see the cherished notion that
the older inhabitants lived in an ecological and spiritual
paradise, never made mistakes, and were imbued each and every one
of them with an innate wisdom and a talent for speaking
philosophically about it.

Setting aside for the moment Stange's phrase "ambivalence
towards wilderness," which is important and which I will return to
later, I can only agree with her overall point that Eco-Indians
are not real Indians, who are as diverse and complex a group of
people as anyone. Nevertheless, the Eco-Indian has become a
cultural icon, and of course some contemporary Indians are
completely capable of exploiting the stereotype both to gain
acceptance in the Anglo world and to exert moral influence on
their own people. "After the movie Dances with Wolves we've
had a lot of people with Sioux blood using that as a springboard
to line their own pockets," admitted the prominent Lakota
journalist Tim Giago.

Although the practice has a long history going back at least to
the 1600s, anyone from "outside" attempting to participate or
learn from Native spirituality will be hammered with with the
accusation of "cultural appropriation." Zeiss approvingly quotes
thealogian Carol Christ, who said, "We can't just take off what we
want from Native American culture and assimilate it, which is a
typical imperialist posture of Americans," but then adds herself,
"The boundaries of human culture, and consciousness, are not so
readily demarcated in fact, as they appear in any 'I/Other
(Anglo/Indian, human/nonhuman, male/female) scheme. This has led
some environmental philosophers to argue for a model of human
culture as a 'mosaic of ever&endash;changing and yet recoverable
parts that can be reintegrated into the present.' Such a model
would make it possible to recognize affinities with the
palaeolithic past, and with modern hunter-gatherer societies as
well, in order to 'fashion an old-new way of being.'"

In other words, cultural appropriate is a valid charge, insofar
as it means putting on the dress of the Eco-Indian without
engaging modern Indians' lives. Yet Stange equally criticizes
those who romanticize Indians as noble savages, genetically
capable of a relationship with the natural world unknown to
Anglos. If you have only lived on on this continent for twenty or
five or two or one generation, you only hurt yourself by acting as
though it is impossible to establish any sort of relationship with
it. What is the point of such high-minded hang-wringing? At its
worst it leads only to complete passivity'

Most Neopagan Witches in my experience proudly distance
themselves from the charge of "cultural appropriation." In print,
in person, and on-line I have encountered numberless variations on
the theme of "We have no need to steal the spiritual practices of
Native Americans [or for Canadians, the 'First Nations'],
for we have our own roots." Modern Pagans are often quick to sign
on with the "Culture Police" and denounce members of the "wannabe
tribe."

But to my mind there is something hollow about many North
Americans' assertions of these Old World roots. They "smell of the
lamp," as nineteenth-century critics used to say (with image of
whale-oil or kerosene lamps fresh in their minds); in other words,
they owe more to scholarship than lived experience.

We must realize, for example, that we do not own a single text
written by a Pagan Celt other than very brief inscriptions. No
anthropologist ever sat down to interview a Druid; even the Roman
historians whose descriptions of the Celtic Gauls are quoted
endlessly were not above treating those Gauls as "noble savages,"
the better to critique perceived lacks in their own society. Even
a great number of the Western European "Pagan survivals" and folk
customs frequently referred to owed a lot to antiquarian landlords
and nationalistic movements of the past two centuries rather than
to any sort of counter-theology. And if an Englishman of the
seventeenth century spoke of the "Old Religion," he meant the
Catholic Church upheld by the Stuart dynasty.

Likewise, the "Murray hypothesis," the idea of an unbroken
secret Pagan practice passed down from pre-Christian times, which
passed as gospel in the British Craft and its American offshoots
until perhaps the mid-1970s, is in my experience now mostly
ignored by the majority of North American Craft elders except as a
soul-stirring myth. Most of us accept the fact that the "witches"
burned or hung in centuries past were for the most part Christians
who went to their deaths with the "Our Father" or the "Hail Mary"
on their lips. While some Pagan writers do continue to hint at an
unbroken "Goddess tradition," they increasingly craft their
language so that it alludes to more than it claims, and in private
tend to defend what they have written by saying, in effect, that
it is a "noble lie" in Plato's sense.

Now, however, we stand at the threshold of a new century, and
for all that the calendar is merely an arbitrary calculation based
on a bad guess about the birth year of Jesus of Nazareth, those
three zeros that we will soon be writing will have their own
enormous mythic power. The new century will be --is already being
--promoted as a time for new beginnings. So here is my modest
suggestion for North American Pagans of all varieties: learn to be
truly "North American" Pagans.

Picking pantheons out of comparative religion books or based on
one's ancestry or imagined attraction will become more and more
unsatisfactory in a changing cultural matrix. At least we are
spared the problem recounted to me by several Swedish students at
my university, who said that for them to show too much interest at
home in the old Norse religion of the Viking Age was to run the
risk of being called a white supremacist by their peers. Among
European countries, that problem is not unique to Sweden.

The charge of "cultural imperialism" made by Carol Christ and
many others keeps most North American Pagans from wholesale
adoption of Native religious traditions, although it fails to
address the fact that those self-same traditions have themselves
changed over time, and that "adoption" runs more than one
direction. And no one "owns" the ideas of drumming, firelight,
chanting, trance work, sex magic, meditation, or the symbolism of
knife, cup, staff, or anything else.

Instead, let the twenty-first century be the century when we
admit that we live in North America, not in Neolithic Europe. We
have no Stonehenge. We have nothing to "go back to." So let's make
a virtue of that fact and start literally at the ground level. In
order to have "nature religion," let's start by understanding
nature.

Many modern Pagans idealize prehistoric times, as depicted
fictionally in works such as Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave
Bear. One thing we can say about those people is that they
knew their landscape well. Yet I meet so many followers of "earth
religion" who have no idea of the source of their drinking water,
no knowledge of the history of the land where they live, both its
human history and its "wild" history, the history of its nonhuman
people, so to speak.

Would not there be a connection between the symbolic element of
water and the water that we drink? Should not people who give
themselves magical names about hawks and wolves and bears at least
look one of those animals in the eye outside of a zoo? And how
come no one ever has a white-breasted nuthatch (for example) as a
power animal. Is it because there is no such bird in a box of
Animal Crackers? Have the people who claim those names really
connected with the animal in its habitat or are they just
projecting their desires for power?

One answer for ourselves might come in questioning what we
really know about where we live. Back in 1981, the magazine
CoEvolution Quarterly (now known as Whole Earth
Review) published a quiz on basic bioregional knowledge called
"Where You At?" A "bioregion" is a loose term for a watershed or
an ecological zone with common characteristics. Some bioregions
are fairly easy to envision, such as the Florida Everglades. Other
zones might require subdivision, such as the High
Plains/shortgrass prairie or the entire Great Basin.

Almost no one, me included, could answer all the questions on
the quiz without some research and thought. But one of the
definitive characteristics of modern Pagans is that we are not
adverse to the scientific way of knowing. We take it and blend it
with the knowledge that we gain in other ways. Thus knowing that
my "soil series" is "Larkson stony loam" can enrich and add
texture to what I think about when I think about the symbolic
element of Earth.

Loren Cruden, one of the clearest writers on "neoshamanism"
(using "neo-" here to indicate its cross-cultural nature) writer
in her book The Spirit of Place: "There is a spirituality
indigenous to every land. When you move in harmony with that
spirit of place, you are practicing native (not Native)
spirituality. . . . Ancestry gives form and continuity to
spiritual practices; place gives immediacy and manifestation to
power."

You don't have to live on a farm to find the answers; in fact,
this knowledge will do more to help a city person to "connect with
the Earth," a stated goal in most Pagan spirituality. At least one
coven in New York City and one in Seattle have adopted the "Where
You At?" quiz in their training programs for prospective
initiates.

Some of my co-religionists may object to the collection of such
basic scientific data as precipitation or soil series. You cannot
find such data at the average metaphysical bookstore. When I took
a Foundation for Shamanic Studies "spirits of nature" workshop
once, we communed with rocks, but no one ever wondered aloud just
what sort of rocks these were or how they came to be where they
are. Our only focus was on what the rocks were "telling" us for
our personal anthropocentric good. An uncharitable outsider might
have said that we were merely "projecting" our wishes onto the
rocks.

Rather than trying to be revived ancient Somebodies-or-Other,
rather than trying to adapt or adopt Native spirituality (which is
itself inconsistent and in a state of flux with many variations),
I would rather see my fellow Pagans focus on becoming rooted. I am
not proposing some agrarian fantasy of instant peasant-hood here,
nor am I ruling out people's needs or desires to move around
occasionally. But when we are in a place, let's be in. Let us
truly learn from it and learn about it. Let us feel its tides and
changes in our lives. I think that someone who knows the flow of
water, the songs of birds, and the needs of grasses has a basic
store of knowledge that puts flesh on the claim she makes that
something is "sacred."

As I have argued elsewhere, North American Neopaganism owes as
much or more to the old Boston Transcendentalists than it does to
the Western hermetic tradition. And it was Ralph Waldo Emerson,
most notable of Transcendentalist writers, who wrote in the
conclusion of Nature, "When I behold a rich landscape, it
is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and
superimposition of the strata than to know why all thought of
multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity." I would hate to
see Emerson's call for transcendental "unity" manifest itself
instead in our common "geography of nowhere," where all the
streets look the same, all the lawns are bluegrass, and all sense
of place has been obliterated. To be Pagan is to be
particular.

So that is my modest proposal. If you would practice "nature
religion" or "earth&endash;centered spirituality," learn where you
are on the earth and learn the songs of that place, the song of
water and the song of wind. Yes, Western science is flawed, but it
is our way of knowing, so take what it offers: its taxonomy, its
lists, its naming. Start there--

gifthen build a richer spirituality from that point. When you
understand something about the relationship of the fire and the
forest, the river and the willow grove, or the accidental history
of the tumbleweed, then you begin to inhabit where you are; then
you are paganus.

Where You At?

1. Trace the water that you drink from precipitation to
tap.

2. What sort of soil is predominant in this place? What
"soil series" is it?

3. Name five native edible plants in your region and
their season(s) that they are available.

4. How long is the growing season?

5. What was the total precipitation in your area last
year (July-June)? (Slack: one inch for every twenty inches or 2.5
cm. for every 50 cm.)

6. Name five birds that live in your area. Which are
migratory and which are year-around residents?

7. What is the land use by humans during the past two
centuries? (The narrower the better: you learn more from the
history of a city lot than from a larger area.)

8. Where does your garbage ultimately go?

9. From what direction do winter storms generally come in
your region?

10. What primary geological event/process influenced the
land form where you live?

11. What species have become extinct in your area?

12. When do the deer rut in your region, and when are
their young born?

13. What spring wildflower is consistently among the
first to bloom where you live?

14. Name five grasses in your area. Are any of them
native?

15. What are the major plant associations in your region?
(A plant association is a group of plants that normally grow in
the same ecological zone, such as the Tallgrass Prairie.)

16. How recently was the Moon full? (Specify the date for
which you respond.)

17. What kind of energy do you primarily use? Where does
it come from?

18. Where is there "wilderness" in your bioregion?

19. What are the primary sources of pollution?

20. What are the major "natural" sounds you are aware of
in any particular (name it) month or season?